In what is becoming a tradition, we are supporting the new openSUSE release in Studio right from day one. We prepared the usual set of appliance templates — just click on the Create appliance link and select the one you like.

openSUSE 12.1 templates in SUSE Studio

Limitations

If you explore the configuration options for openSUSE 12.1 in Studio, you may notice that the EC2 format and LVM configuration are not available yet. These will be enabled once we are confident that they work flawlessly with this new release.

Also note that there are a couple of minor known issues:

Login prompt in text-mode appliances may not be initially visible after boot.

Loading the list of modified files in testdrive may hang in some cases.

Building an exported appliance in KIWI can fail when installing the libncurses5 package.

We are working on resolving these as soon as possible.

Testdriving openSUSE 12.1 GNOME desktop

Testdriving openSUSE 12.1 KDE desktop

What about upgrade?

With previous openSUSE and SLE releases we offered one-click upgrade of your older appliances to the current version, so that you don’t have to re-create them from scratch. We will have this for openSUSE 12.1 as well and plan to release it next week.

Note that while openSUSE 11.4 templates will be removed soon, the existing 11.4 (and older) appliances will work and you will still be able to create them by cloning. Upgrade to 12.1 is optional.

Big thanks

The SUSE Studio team would like to give big thanks to the awesome openSUSE community. They patiently listened to our problems, quickly fixed them, and helped us ensure that everything works smoothly. It would not have been possible to have same-day release of openSUSE 12.1 in Studio without their support.

Now that you know everything go and have a lot of fun with openSUSE 12.1 on SUSE Studio!

5 comments:

Also: please note that at this time GNOME 3 does not work in standard hardware accelerated mode in testdrive. As testdrive does not have OpenGL support, GNOME 3 falls back to "fallback mode", which is quite a different experience than GNOME 3 with proper video acceleration support.

However, appliances you build with GNOME 3 in SUSE Studio should work properly on supported hardware… and with openSUSE 12.1, this means that most hardware should work without having to install binary-only driver support, as 12.1 has much better open source support for NVidia and ATI video cards (and, of course, the Intel driver support is already great too).

AFAIK openSUSE 12.1 supports only GNOME 3.2 out of the box. I don't know whether there is a reasonable way to install/enable GNOME 2 or MATE, but you can try asking on the openSUSE forum where more knowledgable people will be able to answer: http://forums.opensuse.org/.

We investigated the libncurses5 error and concluded that older RPM (e.g. the one in SLES 11 SP1) does not handle package order correctly with 12.1 packages. We didn't encounter problems with RPM in 12.1.

As a result we decided to officially support building 12.1-based KIWI-exported packages only on 12.1. Related code changes (making the build script emit a warning when trying to build on non-12.1 systems) will be deployed soon.